JFK Library launches 'Moon Shot' exhibit

Paul Ring

Thursday

May 21, 2009 at 12:01 AMMay 21, 2009 at 9:14 PM

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, the Kennedy Library has launched "Moon Shot - JFK and Space Exploration" that tells the story of the earliest days of America's space race with the Soviet Union.

When President John F. Kennedy stood in front of Congress in May 1961 to propose "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth," the United States had just 15 minutes and 28 seconds of experience in space from the flight Alan Shepard's Friendship 7.

After the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1958 and the orbital flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Kennedy began looking for a way to best the USSR and show off America's technological prowess.

"The launch of Sputnik was a real wake-up call for America," said Stacey Bredhoff, curator of a new exhibit at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston. "The thought was if they could send a satellite into orbit," their missiles could reach the United States.

"President Kennedy sent out a memo asking, 'Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets (in space)?"' Bredhoff said.

That memo is on display next to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's reply. "...With a strong effort," the Texan wrote, "the United States could conceivably be first (in a manned trip to the Moon) by 1966 or 1967."

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, the Kennedy Library has launched "Moon Shot - JFK and Space Exploration" that tells the story of the earliest days of America's space race with the Soviet Union.

The U.S. would spend $25 billion (or about $150 billion today) on the effort from 1958 to 1975. "We're going to celebrate the moon landing," Bredhoff said, "but there was eight years of effort before that. A tremendous national mobilization."

Dominating the main room of the exhibit is an unfinished spacesuit from Project Mercury, including helmet, boots and gloves.

In the same gallery are a set of blueprints for the ensemble, on loan from the National Archives' southwestern regional office in Texas, including the long underwear the astronauts wore underneath.

Breshoff admitted the timing of the exhibit's opening last week was fortuitous, with daily reports of space shuttle Atlantis' repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope featured on the evening news. "What they're doing up there is amazing," she said. "I wish we could say we planned this."

The work astronauts are doing in space on the Hubble Space Telescope and international space station, Breshoff says, has made space travel seem almost commonplace. "For young people, it's hard for them to imagine a time when we were not in space," she said.

But in the early 1960s, there was an excitement surrounding the space program. "I just spoke to a woman," Breshoff said, "who told me she remembered the excitement, how it was when it was all brand new, and how much courage it took."

An oft-quoted speech Kennedy made on a steamy day in 1962 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, is featured on a video presentation in the main room of the exhibit.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade," Kennedy said, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

"Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

NASA officials sent Kennedy a number of spacecraft models.

Included in the exhibit are scale models of a Saturn IC rocket, an Apollo command module and a Gemini capsule. Kennedy also received a pair of Mercury models depicting John Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule.

"President Kennedy was intensely curious," said Breshoff, standing in front of a photo of Kennedy peering inside the real Friendship 7. "He loved talking to the astronauts."

Kennedy had flown to Florida to present Glenn with NASA's Distinguished Service Medal. Breshoff said the president peppered Glenn with questions.

Glenn is quoted as saying Kennedy "was eager to know the details of the flight: What I saw, what things looked like, how I felt during re-entry, was it hot or wasn't it hot, how did I feel when it banged down on the water...how did it feel and what did I think about at various times."

Kennedy became friendly with all the astronauts, but he and Glenn became very close. Before his death in 1963, Kennedy suggested Glenn go into politics.

Though Kennedy never lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, a prominent place in the museum's Legacy Gallery is home to a moon rock brought back by astronauts on Apollo 15, tangible proof that his call to action was answered.

THE ESSENTIALS:

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum is at Columbia Point, next to UMass-Boston's Dorchester campus off Morrissey Boulevard.

"Moon Shot - JFK and Space Exploration" runs through spring 2010.

Admission is $12 for adults; $10 for seniors 62 and older and college students with ID; $9 for children 13-17; and free for children under 12.

The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., except certain holidays. It is open Memorial Day, Monday, May 25.

For more information, call 617-514-1600 or go to www.jfklibrary.org.

The MetroWest Daily News

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